


Let Me Feel The Lack

by themantlingdark



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-08
Updated: 2018-12-08
Packaged: 2019-09-13 20:07:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16899075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themantlingdark/pseuds/themantlingdark
Summary: A grieving Thor.





	Let Me Feel The Lack

They wake to a roar and a wet crunch. They're on their backs in a desert and don’t remember when they fell asleep. Low clouds hang overhead and a fine mist of rain slicks their faces. Thanos and Mistress Death are, respectively, a smear of red that’s slowly bleeding through the sand and a scattering of grey dust that’s darkening as the rain seeps into it. Thor and Vision are standing by the bodies, staring down at them. The wet tap of the blood that drips from Mjolnir’s head against the ground below is all anyone hears until the rustle of fabric overwhelms it as they all climb to their feet.

“Did you put us to sleep?” Stark asks.

“In a way--it’s a side effect of dreaming,” Vision answers.

“Where’s your little brain-star?”

“Gone now,” Vision says.

“Who has it?” Rogers asks, frowning.

“No one has it,” Vision answers. “It’s gone.”

“You can use the gems to destroy each other if you do it in the right order,” Thor explains, still staring down at the ruined bodies before him. "The Mind stone was the last to go."

“You destroyed all the gems?” Rogers asks, and Thor nods once.

Tivan Taneleer begins to weep, but the look Thor levels at him could stop time, and the whimpering ceases.

“How long were we out?” Natasha asks.

“Nearly six hours.”

"I take it they weren't happy about the stones,” Steve says, coming closer to Thor and joining him in gazing down at ruined flesh and hungry insects.

“I did try to reason with them,” Thor sighs. "So did Vision."

“Generous of you,” Steve says, squeezing Thor’s shoulder and shaking him lightly.

Thor hums and listens to the buzzing wings of the flies that have come.

“You might want to burn them and blow them away before anyone gets tempted to take samples,” Vision suggests, and Thor asks everyone to close their eyes and cover their ears.

He can see through the flash of his own lightning. The water in the blood bubbles and boils away and then the remainder scorches. The sand melts into veins of glass that run like tree roots below the earth. The stink of charred flesh hits Thor’s nose before Thanos is finished burning. Thor waits until the bones have collapsed and there is only ash before he brings wind to scatter the remains of the two bodies across acres of desert.

  
  
  


Three days later, Sif comes for Thor in New York. Her lips are pinched and her eyes and nostrils are slightly wide. She won’t tell Thor why she’s come for him until they’re back on Asgard, so he goes.

On the bridge, he mounts the bay she brought for him. The air is cleaner and clearer than on Midgard. Thor can smell a mixture of stone, gold, heather, and horses. He remembers the scent as a comfort without feeling its effect. As they ride toward the city, he sees himself from a remove. From the memory of an expectation. He knew he’d be back, and he knew why. He merely thought he had more time. He allowed himself to hope that he had fifty years. Now he sees that hope is a trap that you bait with what you want and then spring yourself when you begin to starve for it.

Thor feels the gaze of every guard lingering on him as he makes his way through the halls. He hears his own footsteps bouncing off of their shields and up to the ceiling.

Odin is grey and withered in his bed, surrounded by healers. Not the sturdy silver warrior Thor remembers. The furs rise almost imperceptibly over his form. His hair is sparse and lank. His skin looks powdered. The sight of him makes Thor feel parched and weary.

“The guards say there was a flash of light and he fell from the throne,” Sif tells him. “When they went to him, he seemed to have aged centuries.”

“Father?” Thor says, softly, but gets no response.

“He hasn’t stirred since he fell,” Sif says, shaking her head.

Thor isn’t certain what Odin did to wear himself out so swiftly and completely. Some magic, certainly, but Thor won’t pretend to know more. And there’s no one left to ask.

Thor spends his days at his father's bedside and his evenings with Heimdall. Heimdall does not press him to talk as they stare out at the stars, and Thor is grateful. The low gusts of their breathing compose most of their conversation.

“I know there are far more than nine,” Thor begins, after five days of easy silence, “but I’ve not had time to count them.”

“Nor have I," Heimdall smiles. "But there are, very roughly, one hundred octillion.”

“Does that count include moons?”

“No.”

“Norns.”

“Aye.”

“And how many are inhabited?” Thor asks.

“Ten octillion. Though only a tenth of those bear life forms that possess the capacity to destroy their own realms.”

“Only an octillion?”

“Only an octillion,” Heimdall agrees, nodding, and they listen to the laughter huffing out each other’s noses.

Thor has known in his blood since boyhood that there are more than nine realms. He felt their skies. But they are beyond the Bifrost and are linked by the branches of other trees, or else exist in their own lonely spheres.

Thor walks out on his balcony that night to admire the full moons. One green orb and one blue. When they were boys, they were going to move there--Loki to the green one and Thor to the blue--and instead of bedrooms side by side they’d have whole worlds--but they wouldn’t be too far from Asgard.

The balcony beside Thor’s own is strewn with leaves and streaked with bird droppings. No flickering lamplight streams out from within. Only a whisper of the room’s former occupant issues forth: the scent of his skin seeping out of everything again after a thousand years spent seeping in, and Thor wonders about the half-life of perfume.

Later, as Thor lies awake in bed, the light from the moons lets him see all the way up to the corners of the ceiling. The recesses of the room are normally lost in shadow and extended by it--in the darkness the edges could be anywhere and contain anything--but in the light they are close and finite and the room is a small solid fact.

In the morning, Thor wakes to an odd feeling, but a familiar one. He first noticed it when he was still a youth. The word for it has always lived on the tip of his tongue, though he could swear he had been able to name it as a boy, but perhaps it hadn’t existed until he grew taller. A tingling emptiness seems to surround him, though his limbs are flush with his ribs and his body is wrapped in bedding. There's a sensation of too much distance between his arms and his chest despite evidence to the contrary. It comes with the suspicion that the physics governing the space around him differs from the physics of the space he himself occupies, and that the neighboring environment is beginning to affect his own. It reminds him of that split-second between when his foot slips in a dream and his body jolts, but without the dread. The sense of a gap waiting to be filled and a question about to be answered. It’s welcome, but it melts away as Thor dwells on it.

At the end of his first week back on Asgard, Thor wakes to find Huginn and Muninn on his breast. Their presence is the only notice he needs, but what they’ve seen flows into his head now nonetheless.

“I shall wear black as well, my friends,” Thor says. He feels the air that’s beaten down by their wings fanning out across his face as the birds fly over his head and alight on his windowsill to let him dress.

War robbed him of the time to properly mourn his mother and brother and now the throne will make the same theft of Thor’s grief for his father; he is to be crowned before the funeral is performed.

They were all taken in such swift succession. Thor can’t help wondering if he’s next, and he can’t decide whether death would be better or worse than being left behind for the remainder of his natural life. He worries he’s been cursed. That everyone he loves is doomed to die from having his affections and that he’ll always be too late to help them. A thousand years of life, and he missed saving his mother by mere seconds. His brother, too. And he suspects he has failed his father in some way he doesn’t yet possess the sense to see.

He’s also irrationally afraid that death doesn’t want him. Afraid that he’s been lied to about time. That there are no years in a realm that’s eternal and that he’s fated to live forever.

But it won’t be forever. It’s just that time is conditional. The time that elapsed in the last five years feels equal to the time that elapsed in the five centuries preceding them. The next four millennia will not be an eternity, they will merely feel like one, which is nearly as bad, but not quite. And, over their course, Thor’s body will decay, and what began badly enough will reliably get worse. The flesh is so eager; it won’t wait for death when it can rot today.

Thor does not wait behind to make an entrance for this coronation. There are none here now to tease him and reassure him. None who will tell him they love him and ask him for a kiss. He walks through the hall while it’s still empty so that he may kneel at the throne before friends, guards, crowds, and elders arrive. He has no wish to call Asgard’s attention to himself. He knows none would be pleased to see his haunted eyes and clenched jaw. The ravens ride on his shoulders and look like claws sprung from the ends of his clavicles. Their feathers blend in with the black of Thor's cape and their silhouettes show stark against his fair hair and skin.

Eir crowns him, at his request.

“Thor Odinson, do you swear to guard the nine realms?”

“I swear.”

“Do you swear to preserve the peace?”

“I swear.”

“Do you swear to cast aside all selfish ambition and pledge yourself only to the good of all the realms?”

“I swear.”

“Then on this day I proclaim you Thor Allfather, king of Asgard.”

The name feels wrong now. To be worthy of wielding Mjolnir is to be Thor. So Thor is a Thor, and Steven is a Thor, and Vision is a Thor. A man-made machine clothed in meat. Thor tries to take it as a compliment. He likes the fellow well enough--perfect manners, perfect body, perfect mind. And Steven is lovely. It’s Mjolnir’s indifference that stings. Thor is replaceable to her. Not essential. But she is like any other star in her indifference. He doesn’t know why he thought she was the exception--or why he thought himself exceptional. When Thor ends, she will replace him--possibly sooner, for he could very well fall out of favor with her again.

So he is no longer the wielder of Mjolnir, but a wielder of Mjolnir. A Thor. A thing.

He is no longer a brother.

No longer a son.

No longer a prince.

Uprooted and potted in a throne. His life feels over, but not over enough to spare him the ache.

Thor stands and Eir sets the crown on his head, then cups his cheeks and kisses them to surreptitiously wipe away his tears. He huffs a laugh at the sleight of hand and she smiles and winks.

“One foot in front of the other, lad,” she whispers.

He nods and she puts Gungnir in his right hand. His mind maps the places where Loki’s fingers had curled around the spear as they fought on the Bifrost, and he is only pleased to take the weapon because it belonged, for a time, to his brother.

The following night, Thor slips off to the tavern where his friends have all gathered and slides a chair up to their table, ducking his head and keeping his hood up.

They go wide-eyed and silent.

“What are you doing?” Sif whispers.

“I came for ale and company.”

“My lord, you cannot.”

“The sun will rise, Sif. And there’s no need for titles--call me Thor.”

“I cannot,” she says, with a sad shake of her head.

Thor’s face falls for a second but he catches it and salvages a smile.

“Some day I’ll make you mad enough to slip up and say it,” he tells her.

“I don’t doubt it,” she sighs, and gives him a grateful smile.

When he returns to the palace, he stands in the flickering light of the lamps that flank the doors to his brother’s room. Tall smooth ebony with gold knobs. Thor knows that if he opens them and steps inside, he’ll see spider webs glistening in lines across the coverlet of an empty bed. Dust on a dining table. The broken spine of a book that’s been lying open on a sofa for years.

But, if Thor remains without, he can almost believe that his brother is within. That he hears the faintly windy billowing sound of a long scroll being advanced. The muffled clay knock of an empty plate being set on a wooden table. He can almost see the remains of the meal on the porcelain: the core of an apple, the branching stems of a cluster of grapes, and bread crumbs. Thor knows that, but for the knife, there would be no evidence of the enormous round of cheese that had been sliced like cake and eaten just as greedily. Without evidence to the contrary, he can let himself think his brother is still at the table, bent over his work. Believe that he can correct an old mistake and bend to kiss the knob of bone below the little curl at Loki’s nape and bury his nose in soft black hair.

He wonders what trouble would have followed if he’d had the sense to do such a thing centuries ago--and how much sorrow could have been thwarted.

Every night, the balcony beside Thor’s own is empty and the air exhaled by the room bears less of Loki’s scent. The moonlight does not remember Loki’s shadow. The air is not grateful for having coursed through his lungs and blood. Every atom seems traitorous to Thor for having forgotten his brother so easily. He wants to tell himself that it’s asking too much to expect dust to remember, but Thor himself is made of the same dust, and he cannot forget, so he cannot forgive the rest of the realm for its laziness.

 

By day, Thor watches from Hlidskjalf and uses the weather to tend the realm, ending quarrels where they start by knocking people over with wind, drowning fires with rain, clearing dying woods with fires from lightning. Soon, he’s doing the equivalent on Midgard. And then Jotunheim. The rest of the realms in Yggdrasil need no intervention. But the realms beyond The Tree are often messy. If he siphons Mjolnir’s strength, Thor finds he can reach them. He feels like a horse batting flies with its tail, but it works. Beings throughout the universe find their cruelties cut short and their faces thrown down in the dust. Most realize it isn’t a coincidence after the second incident at the latest, and even the stubborn catch on by the third; Thor is not gentle when he topples them, and he grows more forceful with those who fail to learn their lesson the first time.

By night, Thor waits. He has one million four hundred and fifty-nine thousand nine hundred and thirty-six days left. At the outside. Give or take. Each breath he draws and each dawn he sees is a tiny victory. And a relief: one fewer. Some day he’ll have taken more breaths and seen more sunrises than can possibly remain to him. It could be today. Anything can happen.

On a rainy morning, Thor shapes the clouds into his brother’s image. Sif comes to see him after supper and says the weather is making people nervous. Thor lifts his right shoulder almost imperceptibly.

“The fields are green and bellies are full.”

The following afternoon is clear and hot. The air shimmers over streets and rooftops. Dogs lie panting in the shade of thresholds. Thor walks to the edge of a sea of rye that sways and ripples under currents of warm dry air. He can’t see the path. For almost a thousand years, he and his brother cut through this field on their way to the river. The grass has forgotten them in less than a decade.

Thor flies up with Mjolnir to survey the field and make his way to the stream. From this vantage point, he can see the trail he and his brother built as a long low channel worn into the earth. But Thor knows the dust won’t remember this little road of theirs for long. The groove will fill in as the ground is shifted by the wind and rain, and then there will be no evidence of Loki’s feet. The water and air forgot the shapes Loki displaced milliseconds after he made them. The names the brothers carved into tree bark as children were obliterated by the trees’ growth before the princes were out of boyhood. Life looks to Thor like one long chain of losses that increase in scale until death and then diminish again until you’ve been forgotten by minds, hills, and trees alike. When Thor swims he sees only the silver flashes of frightened fish and the slow gold swirling of his own hair and limbs around him.

By the blue, then lavender, then rose light of dawn, Thor stares at the warp and woof of his bed linens and wonders if their weavers are content in what they do, or if they too are treading water, trying to expend their lives in something others might find useful while they wait to learn why they themselves should bother--or whether. And if there is no reason, what then?

He watches his arm move as he pushes back the blankets. Levers and pulleys. Thoughtless and purposeful. It occurs to Thor that perhaps thoughtlessness is the thing he is missing. The ants and the birds don’t appear to ask why. He tells himself to try to follow their example and do what he was made to do: wield the sky and guard the realms.

He remembers the thoughtless ease of all those walks through the rye. The warmth of the sun on their shoulders. The brush of their hair as it swayed over their ears and the rustling tickle of the grass against their legs. They were going to the river to swim. The action and its reason. And why to the stream to swim rather than to the library to read or to the yard to spar? Because it was the one thing they both liked better. Because it was warm. Because to swim was nearly to fly. Because they wouldn’t lose each other to another’s dusty words or to monotonous drills. Because they’d have each other in their skin--reason enough for millennia. Thor remembers the looking. Neither brother bothering to hide it, nor ceasing when caught. Every day in slightly different bodies. First growing up, then growing older. But now there will be no laughter to deepen the lines at the corners of Loki’s eyes and lips. No first grey hair. No more triumphs or disasters. Only nothing at all for as far as Thor's eyes can see.

Thor dreams of scattering himself through the skies until he is stretched too thin to call himself back together. Until there is nothing left that can ache. But then Loki would truly be lost. No one would look for him. No one would long for him. No one would expect to hear his footsteps in the hall. No one would sleepwalk to the library in the middle of the night to tell him that the books will still be there in the morning and he should really go to bed. There would be no love left for Loki in all the realms. And Thor would have furthered loss.

It seems odd to Thor that things as incorporeal as love and memories can be lost, and then it occurs to him that they are corporeal. That those things are tied to his being. But he still can’t work out why those things have worth to him and why this sentiment survives. Is dust that remembers Loki better than dust that doesn’t? Can anything have value when the sum will always be zero? All will come to ruin, and Thor isn’t pretending otherwise, so does it make any difference if it’s all lost now rather than later? Can you still call a thing victory when you know it won’t last? Is it surrender to seek the inevitable?

Thor suspects the real answer is no, but the answer he wants is yes. He supposes that it wasn’t until dust began to think that dust began to get things wrong. Loki probably would have liked that. The chaos caused by choice. The mind by necessity dishonest and irrational--and, somehow, richer as a result, if only in the imaginations of tiny clusters of dust.

  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> please pretend commenting is turned off and please don't repost


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